We’ve discussed in past blogs how important organizational Change Management is to deploying SaaS. There are other elements, however, that must also be part of the consideration set when preparing to deploy a SaaS solution. As a leading implementer of Workday’s SaaS solutions, we’ve seen the impact of these elements play out rather consistently in various projects. Based on our experience working with customers to replace “legacy” ERP systems with SaaS, here are some of the items we see as critical deployment considerations:
- Legacy Data Readiness. Many organizations don’t discover that they have missing or out-of-date records until they try to move to a new solution. Key takeaway is being familiar with your data, its interdependencies and what is truly important to bring forward.
- Project Team Empowered Decision Making. It’s important to empower the team assigned to the project to make tough decisions, so progress isn’t held up waiting for everyone to sign off on a change.
- Standardizing System Roles and Responsibilities. Modern enterprise solutions use role-based security to control both access to records and drive automated routing of requests, also called workflow. Standardizing roles is especially tough for “blended” organizations, following mergers and acquisitions.
- Impact of Consolidating to One System. Especially if multiple legacy systems share a common identifier, like an employee ID, but are updated separately. Differences will abound!
- Ease of Integration with Other Systems. Most modern HR systems are the “system of record” for employee data, which is shared with other systems and applications. Moving those links to a replacement system will take longer than you think!
- Dedicated Project Team Members. For most workers, project tasks are in addition to their regular jobs. It can be more cost-effective to back fill with temporary help than to risk schedule delays by overloading key staff members.
While other considerations exist, these have the potential to keep a project from being delivered on time and on budget. Up-front attention to these items can ensure a smoother deployment effort to a SaaS solution such as Workday and enable the effort to focus on strategic outcomes rather than keeping the status quo intact. Ultimately, these consideration items are also a part of the reason the ROI for such a move is so compelling – you can finally solve all of these problems permanently!
TAGS: Best Practices, Software-as-a-Service, Workday, ERP, Integration, Legacy System, Software as a Solution, Software-as-a-Service, Workday
